This wacky Saudi cleric has a novel proof that the earth does not rotate. You see, if the earth rotates, then all you’d have to do to fly west* is get in an airplane, hop into the air, and stay stationary and wait for your destination to roll up under you. And you wouldn’t be able to fly east because your destination would keep rolling away from you. Therefore, the earth must be stationary.
Apparently, he also believes that the sun orbits the earth, and that astronauts have not been to the moon, but I haven’t been able to find any record of his innovative arguments for those claims, which I’m sure would be eminently entertaining.
*He’s also a little unclear about which direction the earth rotates, but go with it, he’s on a roll.
At least he’s not claiming it’s flat… or on top of Great A’tuin… is he??
I love these people who have figured out why all scientists are complete idiots because obviously . . .
I can’t remember his name, but one congress member claimed in a hearing that climate change couldn’t cause the sea level to rise because when ice melts in your gin and tonic, the glass doesn’t overflow. I don’t know if anybody bothered to point out that most of the melting ice is on land. Then of course there are the claims that the 2d law of thermodynamics rules out evolution, made by people who are apparently unaware that the sun showers energy upon the earth. There’s no end to these sorts of clowns.
Here is a link to the video with English subtitles http://english.alarabiya.net/en/webtv/reports/2015/02/16/Saudi-cleric-rejects-that-Earth-revolves-around-the-Sun.html
The usual rebuttal: Ever been on a train, good sir? Ever jump while the train is moving forward? When you’re in the air, during the jump, does the floor move, such that you land much further down the aisle, or do you land pretty much where you jumped up? That effect of still moving forward with the train even though not touching it anymore, is called Momentum. A well verified, and established effect. It only takes a little modification of the imagery (i.e. “imagination”) to substitute the rotating earth for the moving train and an airplane for the jumping person. That is why …! allah forgive me !…I can’ t continue without throwing out this glib insult: We use your numbers, why can’t you? The maths is not dificille at all. I suppose you also think that when you walk, your body doesn’t actually move, it just makes the ground move under you until your destination arrives at you. [there’s a Jackov Smirnoff joke in there somewhere. maybe it’ll come to me. *snicker*]
cervantes @#2, I’ll bet that congressman personally insures that lots and lots of gin can’t spill onto a floor, and has been doing so since late childhood.
cervantes wrote @2:
You should have seen Jon Stewart’s comedic response to that bogosity, The Daily Show illustrated it perfectly.
Once you believe there’s an invisible man in the sky, any further idiocy is an anti-climax.
You’d be surprised how often I got this question when I volunteered at Ask an Astronomer. Thankfully, most people had enough experience with walking on airplanes to correct themselves when I pointed out the plane and air are also spinning.
Am I misunderstanding the direction of the Earth’s rotation? The Earth rotates counter-clockwise when viewed from the North pole. If you were to hover “in place” (relative to a non-rotating reference frame) while the Earth turns below you, you would land west of where you started. I think the cleric got the direction right, if nothing else.
Sounds like somebody needs this amazing, hilarious series from CoolHardLogic.
@ 4: Just as important, the atmosphere rotates with the earth. Momentum is not really the explanation, since that would carry you in a straight line to outer space.
Does this particular cleric have any position of significant influence within Islam?
We have flat-earthers and geocentrists in the west, too, and some of them are clergy with their own congregations. It’s too bad they don’t put their messages on youtube . . . .
So how does he travel east? When both his feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second, does he lose a couple of kilometres of progress?
@9: The article doesn’t say which direction is correct. From the article:
This reminds me of the bugs bunny (?) cartoon where he is inside a house which has fallen off a cliff. Things are floating around the house and he can’t figure out what is going on, so he looks out the front door and sees the ground rushing up. A split second before impact, he calmly steps out the front door and softly touches ground while the house behind him crashes violently.
@Jacob Schmidt: The fact that he doesn’t is his evidence that Earth doesn’t rotate.
@joel, #12
He seems to have no internet footprint other than the one he recently made in his mouth. There’s not really an “official” Muslim church, so just about anyone can set himself up as a cleric. Of course there are thousands of Christian churches that are pretty much one man inflicted with Dunning-Kruger, his unfortunate children, and a couple of confused neighbors. This one just seems to have latched onto by the ever-changing strands of the web.
Didn’t he basically just describe the Coriolis effect?
This reference is getting old, but I always have to say it: these kinds of people must be the ones who made Halo 2.
@18, andrew
I didn’t read the article, but from what PZ said and what post 14 quoted, no. Those ideas are not the coriolis effect. The coriolis effect is about moving closer to the axis of rotation, or further from it. This person’s thinking would apply even if you just stepped off a cliff (and maybe hover using a jetpack), with zero change in distance from the axis of rotation.
I used to believe the same thing. But then I got to be 10 years old.
“I never thought of it that way”
Really. I would have assumed *everybody* had thought of this a few times. Usually as a joke or as a thought experiment. But I also assumed everyone figured it out within seconds.
Gravity, not atmosphere, keeps us out from outer space. Atmosphere explains why we don’t have a steady wind in our face.
I was a little surprised in high school when I learned when Galileo was given the counter argument that if the earth rotates things would fall at an angle and we’d experience fierce winds, he didn’t actually have momentum figured out and thought there might later be an undiscovered glue. (Or maybe he did have a solution and my source was wrong or I misinterpreted it. [Then again he didn’t know what gravity *was* so he probably assumed it *ought* to work with a universal frame of reference.]) In the film Agora, Hypatia does actulally have to do experiments dropping sack of grain from the mast of a moving ship to convince herself of the phenomenon.
I lost a *lot *of sleep as a child over that one. Somehow being *inside* a frame of reference was intuitively obvious to me but switching from one to the other wasn’t. Also there was something about going *down* rather than vertical that made visualization hard. If he had casually stepped out of a speeding train it wouldn’t have convinced me for a second but a falling house seemed different.
So.
They don’t have merry-go-rounds in his neighborhood?
@22. Right. That’s what I meant. It’s the rotation of the atmosphere that forces planes to use energy to get from point A to point B. Gravity bends our momentum to keep us from flying into outer space. I was responding to a commenter who said that momentum is the reason we don’t see the earth moving under a stationery hovering object. Fortunately, that is not the explanation, or we’d have circular momentum.
I got things jumbled up in my head. I mean ask how he thinks people walk forward on buses. Or trains. Or boats. Or literally any of the moving things we walk around on just fine.
re cervantes @24:
Sorry to assume you are referring to my comment about “momentum” being ignored (since I was the first to mention momentum) I mentioned momentum in relation to that “jumping while inside a moving train” allusion. There, ‘angular momentum’ is a negligible issue. Just to try to clarify my earlier allusion, sorry, if I garbled a bit…
So then — a hot-air balloon will get someone to the west coast as fast as an airliner. One revolution in air transport, coming right up!
Of course there would be some problems. Rocky Mountains approaching: Must Gain Altitude!
Uh-oh, the jig is up. All these so-called “astronomers” and “scientists” pushing their “theories” about a rotating “earth” so as to keep those sweet, sweet grant dollars flowing are gonna have to find a new scam to bilk money outta Uncle Sugar. 2400+ years feeding at the public trough is enough.
Thank you, Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari !
but these all beg the question. Ultimately, the issue is “stationary” relative to what? Momentum, atmosphere as thick as soup, friction and sticky as glue, or floating like a whisp in a cloud may or may not explain anything but for the earth to spin like ball beneath us requires some hand-hold in another frame of reference for us to cling to.
I really wanted the sun to set on my house so I drove up a hill and revved my tires. I pushed the earth so hard in the other direction sun set arrive five hours early. Too bad my car stayed in the noonday sun and my house was now five thousand miles away from where it started.
Well, I think people think that they *are* traveling at speeds and that’s why they are unstable on their feet with the justling and the bumpings. That’s why they say “it was amazing! The fly in the car must have been flying at over 60 mph!”
I *do* remember being young and on an airplane and thinking it’d be fun to jump and watch the floor fly away beneath me. I think I concluded when I was disappointed that I was only off the ground for too short a time to notice. I was the same age when I thought it’d be fun to jump of the edge of a bathtub while simultaneously kicking off a light weight toy– I thought it’d be interesting to see a toy still falling through the air while I had already landed (I figured being about 100 times lighter than I was it would take 100 times slower to land so I could kick it off; jump off; land; look and still see the toy falling). When it didn’t I figured my error was in that in the time it took me to land and turn my head the toy had already landed and I missed it. It did not occur to me to get a third party to watch me. Or to use a stop watch.
Incidentally, the coriolis effect proves that the earth is rotating.
Sheikh al-Khaibari’s thought experiment was illustrated, says the article, by pointing to a spot on the side of a sealed drinking cup (presumably rotating [or not] on an axis through the centers of the bottom and the lid). Pretty nearly a cylinder. So no, the Coriolis effect does not refute his example, since the point he is talking about is moving like a point on the equator, where the Coriolis effect does not apply — think of a point on the lid (or a spinning record), some distance from the spindle, for an example of where it would apply. In a similar manner, a Foucault pendulum on the equator does not rotate its axis of oscillation, like it does anywhere else on Earth.
To eliminate atmospheric considerations, al-Khaibari should, from an equatorial launch pad (this won’t work from Sharjah airport in the United Arab Emirates, at about 24.5 degrees north, where he suggests we start), launch a missile (potentially a satellite) straight up. At a certain height (35,786 kilometers) it will reach the height of a geostationary orbit, where it will stay — if it is also given an appropriate orbital velocity (3,066 meters/sec) to follow the rotation of the Earth toward the east. If it just goes straight up, it will fall right back down, but some distance to the west, just as the Sheikh predicted, as the Earth rotates west-to-east (counter-clockwise as seen from the north) below it.
He’s right. And the Earth does rotate on its axis. He just hasn’t done his own experiment.
Recall the George Carlin routine with the falling elevator? He said he’d try jumping up at the last instant. He admitted it would be a very iffy thing but also that he’d at least make the attempt. :)
warning! about to derail:
And a truck full of birds will weigh less, if all those birds fly inside that truck. donchano? I think it took the Mythbusters an entire episode to BUST that “legend”.
– ummm, speaking of Mythbusters: Doesn’t busting a myth, imply that it is actually Not a Myth, but a Truth instead? Shouldn’t “Myth Confirmed” imply that the legend under discussion is really a Myth, ie a misapprehension; a falsehood? They always do it backwards. I know what they mean, but it still always makes me rankle. sorry to derail, let’s rerail, okay?
Um, wasn’t that Bill Cosby?
I think it is rather fitting and illustrative that this cleric is drawing his physics from Looney Tunes.
Someone should get the cleric a stack of “Alpha Flight” comics from 1983.
Guardian had the ability to disengage from the rotation of the Earth and could use it to zip westward at high speed.
Picture here
And before you say, this is just a make believe story, so it doesn’t prove anything … um, we’re talking about a CLERIC here. Obsessing over the make believe is his forte.
My first thought was The Onion, but no, it’s Al Arabiya. I’m impressed that any media outlet owned by the Saudi’s would poke fun at any mullah or ulema or whatever he is, regardless of how ridiculous his claim. They might be contributing to apostasy by undermining the convictions of the faithful.
Well, if he’s a devotee of The Daily Show that would explain the mixup over the rotation direction :-)
Silly people, the Earth doesn’t rotate for true believers, but for expensive luggage it’s another story. Why do you think it turns up at a totally different airport to you?
This explains why whenever I try to do jumping jacks, I end up slamming into the gymnasium wall.
#9
Am I misunderstanding the direction of the Earth’s rotation? The Earth rotates counter-clockwise when viewed from the North pole.
Actually, it rotates clockwise from that view. Or if you viewed Earth from above the equator, with the nort pole at the top of the frame, you would see the land below you move left, towards the west, meaning your viewing position is moving east relative to the land.
HAHAHAH I’m drunk never mind
Though he’s wrong about everything else, he is envisioning the right direction of rotation (as Overlapping Magisterial caught up at 9, and Holme caught himself mistaking in 41/42). If I could step up and remain stationary wrt the earth’s rotation and then step down again, I would end up west of my starting point.
I am glad Holmes caught himself. I was going to say the the Sun rises in the East because our little patch of Earth and we are moving toward the Sun, in other words to the East.
IIRC, ICBMs, being sub-orbital, had (have?) to take into account the Earth’s rotation in their flight paths. The missiles targeted at USSR flew over the north pole, and had to be aimed at where their target was going to be, taking into account the flight time.
I take it he also believes all the stars etc are on firmament or a heavenly sphere that rotates around us?
Also the important concept is inertia.
Actually, if you watch the video his explanation doesn’t even make sense on its own terms.
He picks up a cup and a pencil and indicates the pencil stays in place and the cup rotates below it and brings China to the plane. He seems to accept that is just fine and perfectly okay with how planes work. But if you reverse the rotation of the earth you, he says, you will never reach china as now the world rotates in the opposite direction and the pencil rotates with it.
?Huh?
So… he’s arguing that it’s possible for the earth to rotate in one direction but not the other heliocentrism which claims the earth rotates in two directions at once? That when the earth earth rotates one way planes can fly in one direction but if the earth doesn’t rotate at all or rotates in the opposite direction planes can’t fly at all? That’s there’s a bunch of ratchetting vectors in the atmosphere that planes get stuck when the planet rotates an opposite way?
—-
oh, wait. I get it. He’s saying a plane has to fly faster than the rotation of the earth to overcome the rotation and rotation speed is some natural upper speed limit because … pencil.
Im a little teapot short and stout,
I have reasons,
hear me shout.
Saudi cleric view of how trains work http://xkcd.com/1366/
This is extra tragic when you consider it was the islamic intellectuals (“modernists” we might call them) who saved the manuscripts of the hellenistic period and systematically translated them to arabic, thus serving as a source of knowledge to the west during the renaissance.
.
The modernists were crushed by a two-front assault by sufists (mystics) and fundamentalists, starting with the book “the destruction of philosophy” sometime around 1000 AD stating philosophy was against the tenets of islam.
birgerjohansson
Quite true, for a given value of self centredness.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. By the cleric’s confused physics, if you jump up, you will also rise in the east and set in the west. He is wrong, but at least he is correct in his wrongness. PZ is right, but is wrong in his rightness. His footnote is incorrect.
Rise in Saudi-Arabia, set in China? Wrong direction. Isn’t it? China is to the east of Saudi Arabia. You jump at noon and hold onto the sun. You hang on to the sun for two hours and then let go. You are now in France and it is noon in France and two o’clock in Saudi Arabia.
So no he isn’t and yes he is.
… I think.
Sweet! The next time I try to jump into a pool and fall flat on my face, rather than blame shot number 3 and beer number 6, I’m blaming the rotation of the earth for moving my landing point!
woozy@53:
Yes he isn’t not wrongly incorrect in his rightness?
He is different people and one of his rightness is both the same.